History of Video Games (1940's – 2010's) – list of firsts | Hacker News Reader

History of Video Games (1940's – 2010's) – list of firsts

ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com

158 pointsBondi_Blue69 comments

This is interesting but the site is missing many important game technologies and incorrectly attributing some.

The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.

Doom is only listed as "first game to present panoramic skies". Doom may have been the first to have ambient lighting and built to be moddable. Probably also the first LAN-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter.

Quake is only listed as "advanced 3D first person shooter" and yet Quake had many technologies that were probably firsts as well. First ip-ip client-server 3d first person shooter, first true 3D environments in first-person shooter, first to use pre-generated lighting in combination with dynamic lighting using a surface cache, and probably more.

I may have some of these wrong, but you get the idea. The site is missing a lot.

>first LAN-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter

that would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_(1973_video_game), its right there on this site https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/maze-war

Good point. I guess I could have said first modem-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter or something like that. Being able to play against friends across town was great.

I actually played multiplayer Maze War at the Living Computer Museum on a Xerox Alto in 2017: https://photos.app.goo.gl/VUVXQ1cG3zWAMWY3A Right is a real Alto and the other two are emulated. The three were running a multiplayer game.

Would work well as a wiki based site

One of the benefits of a single maintainer is that they can say 'this is my definition of these technical terms and if you don't like it you can go suck a lemon'. A Wiki will quickly devolve into endless bickering over what really counts as 3D and where the boundaries of certain genres lie.

Using some random individual's definition of something is rarely useful. If that means things can't be neatly fit into a list, so be it. On top of that, knowing that there is an open discussion around a topic is, in and of itself, usually useful to understand as well.

> first true 3D environments in first-person shooter

Descent had this before Quake, and I think even Ultima Underworld was "true 3d" (edit: but wasn't a shooter).

>The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.

I couldn't find a reference for this, and my recollection is that Unreal had amazing (for the time) detail textures when you got close to an object, but they were very repetitive.

I think what unreal did was overlay the texture with another texture when you get close to it, so it looked more detailed.

The water is procedurally generated. I don't recall any other textures that were procedurally generated in the game.

I have a great supplement to this.

Back in 2000 I had a subscription to the UK PC Gamer magazine and they did a huge "Complete History Of Games" poster, with connections between everything that influenced everything else.

Imgur won't let me upload my scan of it in full resolution, but here's a lower res and still readable version of my scan: https://i.imgur.com/eZPLvMR.jpg

Fellow PC Gamer UK reader from the early 2000s. Funnily enough the first magazine issue I bought contained the Duke Nukem Forever announcement, which became a running gag for delayed releases for over 10 years.

Oh my. Is it possible to upload the full resolution anywhere?

I couldn't find a site that'd let me upload it in full res, but I've put it on Imgur cut into four pieces. You can just stitch them back together to get the whole thing at full res. Unfortunately Imgur's also re-encoding the image at a lower JPEG quality. Anyone know a good free large + high res image host that doesn't need an account? Original is 9880x6966, 35MB.

Sorry about the minor glitches in the scan - the original scan is many smaller scans stitched together as well as I only have an A4 size scanner, and the poster must be about A1.

Top left: https://i.imgur.com/NHTOq98.jpg

Top right: https://i.imgur.com/nwyFrq7.jpg

Bottom left: https://i.imgur.com/gO3Ihum.jpg

Bottom right: https://i.imgur.com/D45rmw4.jpg

https://catbox.moe is pretty good, up to 200 mb uploads. It should be able to handle the original no problem.

Excellent, here it is:

https://files.catbox.moe/sycbnk.jpg

Bonus, here's the other side of the poster, which shows the covers of every single issue of PC Gamer (UK) up to that point:

https://files.catbox.moe/ztimof.jpg

This is such a wonderfully detailed poster. Please do try to upload on archive.org for conservation sometime.

I'm not sure if I really have the rights. But since you're the second person to say it, I've uploaded it with all the info I have: https://archive.org/details/pc-gamer-uk-2000-the-complete-hi...

archive.org should allow upload of the original picture.

Dropbox or Google Drive or similar surely.

The Space Wars (1977) gameplay video is me playing my old arcade game with my son. The video is copied from my YouTube channel -- maybe this guy should attribute the source of his gameplay clips...

I sold the game years ago as it is rather large. I also worked with a few ex-Cinematronics engineers back in the day. They claimed it was a "hack shop" but a lot of fun at times.

Take one for the team. He is storing and trying to preserve this info, which is valuable by itself.

Giving sources helps with the preservation: readers can follow-up to find out more

I found the original video and uploaded to archive.org so everyone may enjoy.

Not sure why it says that Mystery House is the "first game with an ending". Hunt the Wumpus from 6+ years earlier certainly has an ending (you catch the Wumpus). Colossal Cave Adventure and mainframe Zork certainly do too. Adventure for the Atari 2600 and Star Raiders for the Atari 800 both predate it by a couple months. It's not even the first commercial home computer adventure game to have an ending, since quite a few of the Scott Adams adventures predate it. At a guess, I'd say it could be the first "graphical adventure game with a text parser interface", but I wouldn't swear to it.

It's weird that Zork doesn't feature on such a list, though I'm not sure what category it might hold, as it was a re-imagining of the Colossal Cave Adventure (also missing from the list).

I have two relevant memories from the 1970's - first, my friend's dad brought home a stonkingly large desktop machine. My first experience with an actual, albeit doubtlessly feeble and tedious computer by contemporary standards.

I am pretty sure Wumpus (or a clone) was what kept us amused for hours there.

Second, a few years later another neighbour - Greg Dubois - employed me to sit and make copies, on a high-speed tape duplicator, of games he'd written for the TRS-80, that he was selling direct to Dick Smith (one of the few retailers of such wares in Australia at the time).

I’m sure Cunningham’s Law will deliver some improvements to this list as people trawl their youth for innovations. But one thing I think is equally interesting is the list of _lasts_ in video games. For example I’m pretty sure Frontier: Elite II was the last commercial game written by a single person, in assembly language, released on a single floppy disk. And it’s been nearly 15 years now since a single game was released without a crafting system, nobody remembers what the last one was.

As for the "written by a single person in assembly": RollerCoaster Tycoon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_ga...) was quite a bit later (1999) than Frontier. Probably not released on floppy though(?)

Yep, fair point. David Braben and Chris Sawyer were quite close over the years (Frontier even had an in-game ad for Transport Tycoon).

Usually Firsts lists contain influential things (although this list shows that a lot of the time it's the Second that becomes influential), while a list of Lasts will probably be full of irrelevant things. I suspect the last game that came out on most consoles or formats will be some movie tie-in or low-budget children's title.

Surprised Ultima VII isn't there for the day-night cycles and AI scripting, etc.

I think only Oblivion caught up with this some 15 years later.

Also Baldur's Gate, Thief, Deus Ex, Jagged Alliance were all genre-defining with their own huge improvements (e.g. 3D sound and lighting in Thief).

>Jagged Alliance

JA came out year after UFO: Enemy Unknown which itself was based on 1988 Laser Squad or maybe even 1984 Rebelstar Raiders

Those didn't have a persistent world map though.

UFO did

I used to play Hunter on Amiga for hours (first open world 3D game). I never understood why it took so long after Hunter for the concept of open world to really stick.

https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/hunter

Why wouldn't Elite (1984) count as the first open-world 3D game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

Don’t know. I think that history is very much a work in progress.

Hunter’s world was a bit more coherent, in that it had no “jumps”.

That could be it. The ideas were in the hands of many. When does one flawed implementation of an idea count as a "first" while another doesn't?

I would argue that the credit of first 3D open-world game belongs firmly to Mercenary from 1985, and not to Hunter with it's 1991 release date.

Mercenary is a 3D vector environment where one can navigate the environment freely, on foot or by using different vehicles and aircraft, enter buildings and explore their interior. The graphics is much more limited than Hunter with the first Mercenary game from 1985 only using simple wire-frame graphics, you can most of the time just walk through.

Even with the technical limitations of it's time this game proved really captivating, once you made it past the initial hurdle of figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this game, after crash-landing on an alien planet in the introduction.

It was one of the few games that really fascinated me back then, and I spent many hours playing it.

There's a good introduction and walk-through of the game and it's sequels on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWTAEd0Z9uI

Pong is in there of course, but on this "list of firsts," its claim to fame is ... "Third arcade game." Though "Second arcade game" is not listed.

Made me chuckle (:

Ok so I just realised that my entire understanding of video game history was wrong! This is fascinating.

I think they forgot Falcon 4.0. First game with procedural campaign simulating an entire warfront where your missions impacted the outcome of the war.

I think Heavy Gear might have technically had a simulation of warfront with dynamic missions, but unlikely for it to actually be winnable in the game.

Also see this video of games that pioneered 3D:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hTehcvSgyWI

>This [Berzerk] is first videogamegame that kiled [sic] a player (at least 3 players)

I thought this meant "killed the avatar on the screen", but no, they are referring to real life deaths. I spent a lot of quarters on Berzerk during my lunch hour at my first white-collar job out of college (alongside Missile Command).

Also glad to see Xevious listed, my grad school buddy and I both got pretty good at that one in the arcade near campus.

> This [Berzerk] is first videogamegame that kiled [sic] a player (at least 3 players)

For more details, there's a scan of the article explaining the death: https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/berzerk

Basically, an 18-year-old had a heart attack after playing the game.

Title typography fix: 1940s–2010s

No apostrophes for decades—apostrophes are for contractions and possession. En dash with no spaces for ranges or relationships.

I feel like there's some notable omissions like:

- Online multiplayer

- MMO

- VR / AR with headtracking

- Generated Worlds

It's a very US centric list, omiting a lot of UK games that were the first their field.

Such as Ant Attack - may be the first isometric game for personal computers.

Chess in 1K for the ZX81

The Hobbit - first to accept sentences for the game parser.

etc.

There are a few games where I’d really like to know how the graphics or some aspect of them was achieved. These articles always fall short. What was novel and how was it done when (in the cases I’m thinking about) you had nothing more than a Z80 and a few KB of RAM.

Fun list to read, lots of memories.

On a side note, why do they use nbsp's for columns? Wondered why the right column didn't align perfectly and had to "inspect". As a developer I know not to use tables for layout, but this is a list.

Hmm, I have the feeling this game [0], was a "First real time 3D adventure game", before Blade Runner?

Yeah, seems to be, according to Wikipedia Atlantis was from March 1997, Blade runner from November that year. I played both, liked Atlantis more, sucked me in for a summer, a very new experience at that time (didn't really realize it at that time). I was translated to dutch with some "famous" Dutch voice actors. Really well done.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis:_The_Lost_Tales

One first I’ve been curious about is the first game to us a ‘Tetris’ style inventory system where you had to fit different block shaped items in a grid representing your inventory. It is very common, but someone did it first.

What about the first to use a slot inventory at all?

In 1984 "Sundog: Frozen Legacy", first on the Apple ][e then on the Atari ST is the earliest example I remember of a game with a slot inventory.

You couldn't yet put something "twice the size", using two blocks but you could already move inventory from character to your vehicle or to your spaceship's cargo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy

This game was made by FTL. They then later on made "Dungeon Master".

The pace of firsts is decreasing over time and 2017 seems to have been the first empty year and since 2020, there has been nothing new? Or is the list not up to date?

Ahoy did a great video[0] about this as well. Really nice production value and also takes on the question of 'what is considered a video game'.

[0] https://youtu.be/uHQ4WCU1WQc

This pretty awesome. There were things in this list that I didn't know they existed.

Sinistar had a number of industry firsts … for the stereo/surround sound and the joystick at least … however it was released just before this market tanked in the early 80’s. Chilling and addictive at the time.

(And hungry!)

Surprised not to see Metroid on here for “first metroidvania” when categories line “first postmodern game” are a thing. Metal Gear Solid should probably get some credit for its advanced cutscenes too.

What exactly is meant by “crowd AI” for Days Gone, because there were plenty of games before that which I would consider having “crowd AI” for some definitions of the term.

Yeah, I recall some of the 360-era Hitman games having a form of Crowd AI for packed street maps (A Mardi Gras hit in particular). Halo 3 had a form of simplified 'flocking ai' for aircraft rendered very distantly in the skybox, too.

The list seems to have a blind spot regarding the UK 8 bit scene.

Find it hard to believe no Beeb or Speccie games have a claim to being on that list. Elite or Virus at the very least.

speaking of history of game consoles this blog post is also good but more birds eye view:

https://pikuma.com/blog/game-console-history-for-programmers

No text adventures nor roguelikes? These games in the 80's made revolutionary mechanics.

Seems to be missing all the old school bungie titles from the 90s

I expected NES Zelda to be a first in something.

Spacewar! was the first video game. It's interesting what happened before then but they weren't video games.

Don't click [view source]

Do they really hate labor or do they hate lazy millennial labor?

I'm sure this will be downloaded to hell, but you have to ask yourself that.

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